Service desk reports: Help desk template, examples, & dashboard

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There's no denying the importance of analytics and performance management now that businesses have become more data-driven than ever. This is true in the case of IT service desk teams too. Large data sets are generated in IT service desks and stored in silos. You can improve your service desk's efficiency and performance by getting better visibility into service desk data.

IT service desk reporting is an essential IT service management (ITSM) practice; it helps organizations gather, analyze, and present insights into service desk data that would have otherwise remained overlooked. Reports can show how effective the service desk is at achieving objectives and help you understand ways to meet targets better. They also enable you to track the status of a specific process at any given time. These features make the alternatives, such as bulky reports, innumerable spreadsheets, and unending pages of numbers, as well as the struggle to get real-time data, obsolete.

While a report provides a detailed collection of data, dashboards are used by IT managers as a type of progress report to get a single, holistic view of service desk functions, operations, and performance.

Reports and dashboards provide various benefits to end users and IT technicians alike:

Empower IT managers to make smarter decisions

Reports are vital to track and analyze the overall health of the service desk to identify areas of improvement. They help identify performance issues, explain why a problem occurred, and recommend a course of action. Using reports, a service desk manager can effortlessly make tactical decisions that can optimize service desk operations, forecast trends, streamline the workflows of processes, etc.

For example, a report on the percent of incidents resolved within SLAs offers insights into the service desk's ability to meet targets within expected standards. Analyzing this report can help identify unrealistic SLAs, insufficient SLA monitoring mechanisms, or gaps in technician training. To overcome these setbacks, appropriate solutions like auto-assigning incidents to the right technicians or sending timely notification of SLA violations must be implemented, as these will propel the efficiency of the service desk forward.

Unify insights from various data sources

IT service desk data is closely interwoven with an organization's IT infrastructure and operations, so it makes sense to consolidate the ITSM and ITOM metrics for proactive IT management. Such blended reports serve as a single pane of glass by combining data from a spectrum of IT-related activities. By providing a holistic view of the IT operational ecosystem, reports and dashboards make it easier to proactively identify issues, increase efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver great user experiences.

When IT services go down, it's only due to an issue with the underlying infrastructure, like servers, storage, and applications, along with the hardware or software used to run the services. Technicians can proactively monitor these components using ITOM software and overlap this data with service desk data to identify patterns, trends, and mitigate potential outages. By combining data from multiple sources, like infrastructure monitoring applications and help desk solutions, organizations can identify the cause and cascading impact that outages in infrastructure components have on various IT and business services. Service desk teams can then use those findings to quickly handle outages.

Uncover insights into specific business objectives

Dashboards are often used across various levels of an organization. They provide strategic guidance on the performance of the IT service desk and help organizations assess the service desk's impact on certain objectives. By customizing dashboards, organizations can get insights into a particular operation and present the right information to the right people at the right time. From assessing the current performance of the relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitoring and spotting any discrepancies in processes, dashboards can give a complete understanding of the role of the service desk from a business point of view.

Example: A CIO creates a dashboard in order to get insights into user satisfaction levels. This dashboard is set to a specific time frame and includes significant KPIs: average cost per ticket, the number of unsatisfied customers, and the number of major outages. It also features reports like SLA compliance vs. SLA breached trend, backlog analysis by customer, and areas with the highest customer dissatisfaction.

This CIO dashboard answers the following questions: How do the current user satisfaction scores and costs compare with this time last year? Are there cost-saving opportunities? Can we shift resources to better align with business objectives? Metrics such as technician availability and the number of breaches/incidents give insights into if there is a reliable environment for providing quality service. CIOs can compare the service desk's percent of IT spend with industry benchmarks. The answers to the questions above, as well as the insights derived from the metrics and KPIs, help the CIO make strategic decisions that impact business objectives and convey IT's contribution to the organization.

Ensure data transparency across teams

Effective communication in a service desk is essential to improve service desk performance and overall user satisfaction. Scheduled reports enable service desk managers to keep technicians and endusers informed with automatic updates. When shared with non-IT teams, reports promotecross-functional communication and make working together to achieve a sharedgoal easier.

For example, asset audit reports, which are a key part of effective IT asset management, are not only relevant to the service desk manager but also to the organization's finance department. Audit reports can include details like asset status, depreciation rate, and purchase price. This helps the finance team ensure that accounting practices are in line with operational objectives. It also helps to provide financial information to external auditors when requested.

Key features in the reporting dashboard in ServiceDesk Plus

Save time with out-of-the-box reporting capabilities

With over 200 predefined reports and more than 80 KPIs, ServiceDesk Plus allows you to monitor, review, and measure your IT service desk team's performance.
View both predefined and custom reports as graphs, in formats such as Tabular, Summary, Matrix, or Audit according to the type of data being filtered. These formats help IT managers derive logical patterns and insights from reports faster.
Schedule reports to be emailed to users periodically, daily, weekly, or monthly, or just one time. Recipients can access the reports without even having to log in to the service desk, ensuring they're kept informed of any progress that occurs. Reports can be exported as CSV, XLS, HTML, or PDF files.

Create powerful, custom reports with ease

If you're looking for a report that isn't offered out of the box, you can create a custom report to suit your needs. In ServiceDesk Plus, custom reports can filter, group, and organize data in every possible way from any module in the service desk. For example, a detailed report on incidents related to installed software would gather data from the Incident and Asset modules as well as the CMDB.
ServiceDesk Plus supports multiple types of reports, including query reports and KPI reports. The user-friendly Reports Wizard takes you through the entire process of custom report creation in a few easy steps.

Visualize your data

Transfer any report in ServiceDesk Plus into a graph, whether it be a pie chart, bar chart, line chart, time series chart, area chart, or ring chart. This condenses the statistical information from your service desk into a more readable format, making it easier to understand the reports.
Each chart's drill-down option allows you to visualize subsets of its data. That is, when a certain part of the chart is clicked, the additional information related to that data is displayed.

Improve your service delivery with survey reports

You can create surveys in ServiceDesk Plus on a drag-and-drop canvas in a matter of minutes. They can be scheduled to be sent to users after completion of certain activities.
Specific surveys can be sent to specific users based on the type of parameters they chose when submitting their ticket. For instance, you can automatically send a survey to the end user when a high-priority ticket is closed. These surveys can measure user satisfaction, get feedback on the service provided, etc.
Reports can collect data from multiple surveys to generate a consolidated view. These reports, which are generated from user survey results, can help you easily assess the performance of the service desk.

Get total visibility into your service desk with interactive dashboards

Create and customize dashboards in ServiceDesk Plus to obtain an overview of all the information you need to analyze your help desk performance, identify IT trends and risks, forecast future performance, and measure the quality of the services rendered. When a dashboard is shared, other users can easily understand the whole idea behind a certain service desk operation from a single screen.
A dashboard consists of widgets, which are visual representations of various functions in a service desk. These widgets can display data from reports in the form of tables and graphs. Widgets can be re-sized and arranged with a drag-and-drop feature, which enables you to create the desired layout. You can generate reports for any module, including Incident, Change, POs, and Contracts.
In ServiceDesk Plus, you can add up to 20 widgets to a dashboard, including various built-in widgets and even custom ones portraying KPIs and reports. You can add external links, such as a resource page or intranet, as an external widget.
ServiceDesk Plus' dashboards operate with role-based access permissions, allowing only users with specific access to view the dashboard and preserving the data integrity of the information on the service desk. In ServiceDesk Plus, reports and dashboards allow you to monitor, visualize, analyze, and interact with data from multiple reports on a single screen and get real-time insights.

Advocate for progress using analytics

ServiceDesk Plus offers powerful integrations with other ManageEngine solutions like Analytics Plus to give you 360-degree visibility of your IT. With Analytics Plus, you can import data and decipher it to facilitate cross-functional business visibility.
Find the right insights by customizing reports and creating your own KPIs and metrics. The integration with Analytics Plus allows you to make faster decisions with a built-in AI assistant that provides instant responses in the form of rich visualizations. With a robust forecasting algorithm, you can analyze historical data to generate accurate forecasts. View your business health from across departments and create impactful reports by combining data from multiple sources. This integration offers numerous ways to export and share reports and dashboards to foster collaboration among business functions.

Great ITSM tool for all service desk daily needs

Good tool that has covered all of our ITSM related needs. It has a great ticketing tool that is easy to set up, customize in many ways, and use. It includes incident and problem management [and] has a good reporting tool. We also use the assets part, so this is also our CMDB.

Industry: Finance
Role: IT administrator
Firm Size: <50-250M USD

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